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The Weapon of Sanity
She lived in a cell alone. They didn't let her talk to people for long, her visitors tended to go catatonic after a while, even listening to recordings seemed to do it. Some fortunate ones babbled in other wings of the facility. In brief lucid moments they said the same things, she had showed them what monsters they were, a terrible truth. Observers peered over select extracts like “As normal human beings we can not grasp disasters by scale. We can not view a plane crash of 100 people with any of the emotion we would give to a single stranger in our arms.” but could not understand why her words held such power. Others did and were broken by it. She worked on a cure for mankind in isolation. Empathy was her curse: it ripped her open whenever she saw the news, (three times a week for one half hour in the evening). However, she couldn't just look away from these things. It would be like boarding up the windows of a house next to a torture chamber. You might not see it, but you would be condoning the suffering of others by refusing to witness it. She felt the slick red blood of people a thousand miles away coat her hands, unable to prevent it being spilt. She began drawing when one of the hospital staff, her psychiatrist, through misted glass and a monitored microphone said some innocent words. "You should do something constructive with your emotions. Try arts." From that day onwards she was given whatever artistic supplies she requested. So she drew and sketched, poured her compassion and empathy onto paper, gave her emotions physical form. She drew the atrocities of mankind, unfiltered by rationale. Everybody saw their own face in her sketches, as they turned away a homeless person, the disgust, not the rational logic that they convinced themselves about afterwards. Her watercolours showed the viewers disinterest in the news of a new genocide and her clay sculpture showed the moment when the viewer would lose their temper, twisted and bitter with hate. It was a piece of art that would open people's minds to the horrors that they permitted, simply because they were too far away to care. Simply because they were too hard to change. A gift for the world. An awful beauty that would drive people into the burning light of sanity and crash civilization down around them. She has created a weapon more deadly than any other, a weapon that only one like her could create. At one man's urgings she had become something terrible, just as he had intended. Her next visit with him was three months away. More art tools, more inks and needles and brushes and papers. She created. She met him dressed in a simple hospital gown in a blank room, wearing a gag so that her terrible words could not escape. While she communicated only on paper, he spoke, and she was forced to listen. Then she unveiled it, her body as a weapon, tattoos inked in painstaking detail showing every cruelty of mankind through a lens of compassionate understanding. One image showed the face of another human being in pain and all of the images radiating away from it reflected your own emotions. Every attempt to distance yourself from it, all your self-righteous justifications. By the end of the interview the would-be weapon maker was sane again, and had to be restrained for his own safety. She could not show the world, but she could show him. Return to Short Stories